An End To Adventures In Babysitting: Using Automation To Free Up Your Creative Team’s Time

“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote. It’s also a thought that may have crossed the minds of your designers and copywriters as they take time away from their creative efforts in order to babysit collaterals through the feedback and review process–shunting them from one reviewer to another, following up with laggards as the deadline for feedback approaches and deciding which edits or changes merit a new iteration. This manual process is often convoluted, frustrating and time-consuming and when you have team members juggling multiple projects at once, unsustainable. The more time your creatives spend babysitting and trying to resolve bottlenecks, the less time they have to do actual creative work. It’s a recipe for lost productivity and a burned-out team.

We don’t think designers or copywriters should pull double-duty as babysitters. That’s why we’ve designed Workgroups DaVinci to take the manual labor out of project management. With advanced routing, collaterals are automatically moved from one set of stakeholders to the next, as feedback and approvals are received. Major changes needed? The system will even route it back to the assigned team member to work on the next version. Here’s how easy it is to set your team up for success with our advancing routing automation.

Log into the Workgroups DaVinci desktop application. Under Configuration in the top navigation, choose Advanced Workflow and Scheduling.

Then, open your template list. Open the workflow template to which you want to add advanced routing. You’ll see a list of activities associated with the template; you can choose to set advanced routing for any activity. Let’s say you want advanced routing on the Internal Design Review activity. You select it and then choose your desired next step for the three possible activity outcomes–the design is approved, it’s approved with changes or it’s rejected. Using logic, you tell the system what you want to happen in each of these scenarios (route back to the designer, move to the next activity, etc.) and Workgroups will make it happen, without your creatives having to intervene. You can move a collateral forward or backward in the system or even have it jump stages based on the logic that makes the most sense for your team’s processes.

You can pair advanced routing with custom notifications to make your process even more efficient. This can be extremely helpful in resolving bottlenecks that happen when a piece of work stalls out at the review stage. If a particular collateral is on its sixth round of revisions and you know work like this usually takes three rounds, you have a red flag to follow up on to see what’s hamstringing things this time around and make adjustments to the process, timeline or other activities accordingly.

We believe creatives’ time and energy should be spend on creative projects. Advanced routing allows your designers and copywriters to skip babysitting in favor of focusing their specialized skills on the work that really matters.